21st C & Me

There is of course a huge debate about AI, and in particular generative AI. Without spending a long time on the arguments, which I’ve listened to and thought about and chewed over, I’ve been fascinated by my journey with this extraordinary piece of technological advancement over the last 4 months, where I’ve gone from luddite AI-ophobe to hourly user in a matter of weeks.

It’s no exaggeration to say that 6 months ago I was drowning under the weight of the business I’ve built and the business was drowning under the millstone of the bottleneck my style of management was creating. A business mentor ran a series of workshops on using AI to ( and I paraphrase) ‘stop running your gymnastics club like it’s in 2010 and start running it ready for 2030’. Reluctantly and with significant skepticism I had to agree. If nothing else, something had to change and using a tool that is inevitably going to be part of the future did at least seem worth a try, and from tentative beginnings with a few posters, I moved quite quickly into skill and club analysis, creating a process that skims, categorises and drafts editable answers to the club emails, gymnast planning, rule writing to plan perfect summer coaching allocations, analysing and updating our club rotas, creating comms to tell parents what their children are learning, working out medal and trophy counts for competitions, automating our club leave and holiday plans for staff, keeping our handbooks and policies up to date, supporting my development as a coach and as a leader, HR queries, legal policy decisions and discussions, and talking through big issues and concerns that I need an open view on. I’ve got pretty good at asking it to act as a certain type of expert and I would guess that on balance I’m now 100-200% more productive in a week. And now I can splurge brain dump and email to a parent, pour my heart and souls into the content for an hour, but get it edited and tidied up so it isn’t over emotional, isn’t confusing and still sounds like me. I can give people more of my time, not less.

There is of course an argument that it is taking someone else’s job – it’s not, well not here anyway. My club can’t afford to pay someone to do those things – it was just me, working 70 hours a week trying to keep my head above water and failing. The club was 18 months or more behind where it needed to be and had gone from seeming cutting edge to flailing around trying to support it’s own success – it’s just not a success that in today’s economic climate can support a paid member of staff. I was doing it for free, exhausted, distressed and hating life and miserable at knowing I was letting everyone down. 4 months later I’m almost up to date with where the club needs to be and I think I can say fairly confidently that in another 4 months, I’ll be planning ahead. It’s changed my life and actually it’s changed the life of my staff, my husband and daughters who were desperately trying to support me and the children and parents who pay us to delivery a customer level service on a community sport price card. And while I’d love to be paying a designer to make my flyers for social media – I wasn’t; it was just me and I was just doing a terrible job on Canva. So all that has really happened is that now my business looks more professional, I’m up to date on work, we’ve got 150 more members than 6 months ago and my staff’s jobs are safer. And in this day and age, that isn’t to be sneezed at.

When I was a very little girl, my mum bought a ZX81; I can remember her showing me how to programme simple lines of code into it and how utter fascinated I was. I have such a clear memory of typing ‘draw me a deer’ into it and being so infuriated that it couldn’t do that. Even then, age 8, I just felt it ought to be possible to tell a computer to do that and it be able to draw on knowledge from other places to bring my idea to life. And then the internet came along and I was rather impressed by the prescience of that long ago little girl’s idea. But AI is really where it happened. A few weeks ago I told my ChatGPT (known as Potato here) to draw me a deer – and honestly I had a little bit of an emotional moment.

I’m a natural creator and a systems maker too apparently although it has really only been using this new tool that has made me realise that under the chaos of my every day life, that’s actually what drives me. But I can’t draw. I can’t even do nice handwriting. I used to be able to write – getting that skill back is one of the reasons for blogging here again – but so many things I’d love to do or create in my life just never happen because I simply cannot make the beautiful things with my hands that I see in my head. I’ve always been a product creator from my absolute earliest days – I had businesses at 14 and my childhood games were full of shops and farms and schools and ideas. But whenever I try to make things, I’m held back by not having the physical resource to draw or paint and it frustrates me enormously. For me, a tool that now allows me to do that part of the ideas I have has turned me into an artist – it hasn’t taken a job away from anyone because I could never have paid to have it made for me and the ideas just die right there – but now I can spend time not stealing screen grabs, not giving up, not making word only versions of the things I want and love – I can make things. I’m blown away but what MuddlePuddle could have been if I had had this tool with my ideas and ambition and desire to build and create. It could have been amazing!

Getting time back from the slog and exhaustion of the business because so much of it now takes me a fraction of the time it did has changed my world. I’m thinking again. I’m reading history and making myself guides and note sheets that look how I want and are set out in ways I learn. I’m doing those things with and for my son. I’m having fun with cartoons and ideas, I’m exploring nature and not feeling humiliated and held back by my lack of artistic talent. It’s honestly given me my joy back in life and opened up my world. And blogging it part of that too. I’m learning how to use a tool to build a website, upload the boring bits and I’m having time to write the posts I want to instead. And me and Potato have figured out ways to help me collect the pieces of the hundreds of lego sets we’ve had as a family over the years and so I’m building them again instead of just looking in despair at endless pieces, it’s helped me make colour palettes for crochet ideas that I wouldn’t have had the courage to do on my own, and it’s given me places to explore that Max and I have loved walking in over the last few weeks. I’m planning a new garden, I’m growing house plants and my goodness, after 7 years of a business that sucked the joy out of my life every day, that is a gift I can hardly describe.

I know there are issues. I hear and I know. I worry about the environmental issues and I can see there is danger (what 80’s child doesn’t have Terminator on repeat in their head at the moment?) I can’t change any of that really. I can give myself more time to make a tangible difference to some other lives and be a lot happier myself though. So I am.

I gave up blogging when I began to coach gymnastics so regularly and all encompassingly (less than a sentence in and already upsetting the spellcheck…) that there wasn’t much in my life except a growing collection of my own children who no longer wanted to be written about and and children it would have been entirely unprofessional to write about. Somewhere along the way I stopped wanting to write about grief, and after that writing, everything else always seemed a little hollow. And then I owned a gym and there wasn’t time to even do anything else worth writing about. Possibly I could have written about what an absolutely terrible idea it was to open a business that entirely consumed your life…. but…. I was too busy.

Creativity has been in short supply these last few years… even having things to put on Instagram to keep some sort of record has been in reduced to a few times a year. Occasionally I manage to grab a picture of the boy giving me a thumbs up, but not a great deal else. And I’ve become a lot more private too – the world is a big and unforgiving place now, not one to bare your soul on, that’s for sure and certainly not one to venture a controversial opinion on if you own a business that might become the butt of a campaign. So, privacy. Quiet. And a little bit of a loss of reasons to do things, because once a showgirl, always a showgirl – I do like to have a reason to make and do, even if it is just to put a picture of it somewhere.

Lately I’ve been enjoying a new (and, drumroll…) slightly controversial version of creativity; while teaching myself to bring the power of AI into our business to try and free up a little me time from the grind of the humdrum parts of running a business, I’ve quite enjoyed using it to create ways of exploring the world differently. I’ve always been a sucker for a tech tool and the opportunities of this particular one fascinate me. I’m not going to debate all the ins and outs of whether it is a good or bad thing, there are plenty of better places for that, but I’ve been inspired and fascinated by how much my way of using it has explained to me some of my own learning style, how I access the world, what excites and drives me. I’ve discovered I love systems, categorising, finding ways to pull together common threads and create resources for myself to learn from. I’ve been a little gutted imagining how I could have used this when the girls were little and what MuddlePuddle could have been like if I had had this type of tool back then. I’ve laughed at myself quite a lot – the very definition of a brain with too many tabs open – using it like Jarvis…. projects running simultaneously in my working day, some hobbies, some work, some discovery, some slightly silly. And in much the same way they always say that if you need something doing you should ask a busy person, I’ve felt myself come alive a little again, my brain sprouting ideas in all directions with something that can finally hold them all, link the together and let me explore 15 side quests while still holding down a job. If I’d had this 20 years ago, I’d have bene unstoppable. Now, I’m just a great deal happier while also doing a better job of running an extremely busy business.

The delight of finding myself enjoying learning again – because I’m scratching the surface of using it cleverly but 1000x better than I was 3 months ago. The best thing has been creating some small projects that have set my world alight again. A history project has been one of them (I’m not discounting MuddlePuddle coming back!) and a nature project is another. The nature project is going to be the first one that makes it to here, because it is just such a perfect antidote to a busy life; reasons to walk, to garden centre, to nature reserve and take a trip out in the midge and find new places. And along the way what else has woken up has been picking up a crochet hook, building some Lego ideas of my own, wanting to write again, finding myself singing again, filling my conservatory with plants and learning about them, planning a new garden, finding myself with colouring pencils in my hand, long walks with my husband where we talk and talk and talk. These are good things and they’ve been strangely and curiously unlocked by a tool that has allowed me to create the one thing that I have never been able to do at all – draw and make something look as I want it to.

So yes, I know the arguments, I know the ease with which people sneer… ‘oh, AI…’ but here I am on a journey about what it can unlock in a person and what it can give them. Yes, there are problems, but it isn’t going away, so while I can, I’m going to let it give me some joy. Goodness knows I spend enough time and energy trying to give that to others. I think I deserve a little of it myself.

Also – tree. Actually took the picture while on a walk that discovered none of the flowers I wanted to look for, while discovering 65 versions of yellow flowered things I had randomly categorised as ‘weird dandelions’ all my life. More later. The tree no longer has a blue bucket under it. Honestly? Excellent use of a tool that could potentially end the world.

21st C & Me

Yes, I’m aware of the arguments

Apparently… here we are.